I never yet read a story where I thought at the end "Wow! Great logic!" or even "Terrible story, but the logic was brilliant!"

I doubt if anyone does, as story logic is the sort of thing that you only notice when it breaks down. Lord knows I I've certainly read plenty of stories where an obvious logical flaw or plothole has brought me up short. Having said that, in this instance 'Silence and Roses' is otherwise so well written that it didn't bother me at all. Sometimes you just have to let the little things slide.

I'm sorry, but the logical inconsistency could've been avoided by simply stating that all the people died during the short time of some plague or other similar cause (this goes on the editor's account).
When I read SF I expect logic to be at least satisfying, but this just poked me in the eye.
And again, it's a very good story, excellent writing, but I would change that little part of the story and it surely would be in all of the Year's best books.

One of the reasons I friends-locked the post originally is that I was (and I remain) concerned that getting into some of the distinctly morbid and depressing logic behind that part of the story was in a key way a detraction from the story itself, which is largely (at least to me) about B-4-C-P's perspective on his own existence and purpose.

I had a couple of different logic problems with the story. It bugged me that the robots were both perplexed and curious about what was going on and yet it didn't occur to them to look up the huge range of medical tests available to them. From the point of view of the robots human beings are intelligent machines. If I owned an intelligent machine that suddenly refused operate the first thing I would do is to look up the manual.

It also seems odd that in all the time the robots cared for the elderly they never read any book referencing it (this seems even more strange given that the main character appreciated poetry).

Rich Horton reviews Interzone 223 for the September Locus and says, "[Dominic] Green is a very fine writer with little reputation in the US, the great bulk of his short fiction having only appeared in the UK. The three stories here are as good a starting point with him as any. The best are two stories set in the same universe, Butterfly Bomb and Glister. In the first, the only man alive on a planet gets himself kidnapped by slavers so that he can follow his grandaughter, which may not make much sense, but all is explained, cleverly and a bit darkly. Glister features a world with a very unusual ecosystem, involving, more or less, gold taking the place of carbon. The hero has been tricked into hunting the gold-digesting beasts in order to buy his way out of the system, but he is somewhat hampered by his ethics. The setting is pretty cool (if improbable), and the plot works out cleverly. And all the stories here show off Green's mordant sense of humour nicely." He also lists Glister as one of his recommended stories at the end of his column.

Now Gardner Dozois reviews Interzone 223 for his column in the October Locus (#585) "Dominic Green is a little-known and underrated writer, on this side of the Atlantic at least. Almost his entire output of short fiction, about twenty stories between 1996 and 2009, has appeared in the British magazine Interzone, which has rewarded him for his loyalty by providing a welcome shocase for his work in Interzone 223, which features thre very strong original stories by Green, and in effect functions as a "special Dominic Green issue." Green's voice reminds me of that of the late James Tiptree, Jr. [...] the stories are told with elan and verve, and a fondness for wordplay that sometimes errs on the side of enthusiasm. These qualities are the most strongly in evidence here in Coat of Many Colors [...] also first-rate is Butterfly Bomb [...] a clever story where nobody and nothing turns out to be even remotely what they seem. Another way in which Green is like Tiptree is his fondness for wild new ideas, the wilder the better, and his lack of fear or hesitation about painting in broad strokes with bright primary colors [...] My least favorite, although still good, is Glister, which still has lots of bizarre conceptualization [...] I suspect Tiptree would have approved of that one too. [...] Suzanne Palmer, in Silence and Roses, gives us a story that manages to balance on the razor-edge of mawkish sentimentality without quite falling all the way in, in an impressive job of tightrope-walking. [...] Eric Gregory's The Transmigration of Aishwarya Desai also contains some intriguing conceptualization, but is a bit murky and opaque in a way that Green is not."

In a desperate attempt to keep the quotes down to fair-use level, I have, believe it or not, missed a lot out.

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests

You cannot post new topics in this forumYou cannot reply to topics in this forumYou cannot edit your posts in this forumYou cannot delete your posts in this forumYou cannot post attachments in this forum